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Children Are a Waste

131 statements
24 feature instances
26 referencing feature instances

Children Are a Waste	type	FeatureClass
Children Are a Waste	label	Children Are a Waste
Children Are a Waste	page	ChildrenAreAWaste
Children Are a Waste	comment	In Real Life and in fiction, the Straw Feminist and the Straw Bachelor are generally at each other's throats. However, it seems that there is one thing that both parties agree on: children are a waste. For the straw feminist, a child serves only to chain the woman at home when she could be aspiring to bigger and better things. To the straw bachelor, a child means being tied down to one woman, and having to pay hundreds of thousands or even millions for maintenance and education, when that time and money could be invested into better use. Other reasons people might believe this is thinking that children are stupid, parasites, spoiled brats, cruel, or just useless — surely all they do is run around playing, eating, and not contributing to society. In works of Anti-Intellectualism, intellectuals and rich industrialists will usually be portrayed in this manner, as Social Darwinists who consider children as inherently worthless "animals" who can be aborted, except when they're invested in an expensive education to make them rich, professional, intelligent and therefore honourable "humans". This may be due to the low fertility rate (and legal abortions for rape, teen pregnancy, and such unplanned forms of parenthood) in industrialized science-oriented countries, and how many said intellectuals know about the ideas of Thomas Malthus. To rectify this, some morally dubious characters may decide to build something Powered by a Forsaken Child. Compare the more irrational sister trope Child Hater. Contrast Babies Make Everything Better and Not Wanting Kids Is Weird.
Children Are a Waste	fetched	2023-04-21T03:43:23Z
Children Are a Waste	parsed	2023-04-21T03:43:23Z
Children Are a Waste	processingComment	Dropped link to AbusiveParents: Not an Item - FEATURE
Children Are a Waste	processingComment	Dropped link to ChildHater: Not an Item - FEATURE
Children Are a Waste	processingComment	Dropped link to ShockJock: Not an Item - FEATURE
Children Are a Waste	processingComment	Dropped link to SocialDarwinist: Not an Item - FEATURE
Children Are a Waste	isPartOf	DBTropes
Children Are a Waste / int_25f6f1a0	type	Children Are a Waste
Children Are a Waste / int_25f6f1a0	comment	Umineko: When They Cry: Rosa shows some shades of this mostly because her boyfriend left her when she was pregnant and left her with a huge loan she co-signed with him. She sometimes hits her daughter and has been commenting on having trouble getting married because of Maria. She also feels conflicted in that while she loves Maria, she is having problems liking her due to her interest in magic and her Verbal Tic. Another, very dark example can be found with Kyrie, who in Episode 7 is shown not to care one bit about her daughter Ange and only considers children to be something to tie a man down with. She is also willing to take the gold and leave her daughter behind while she flees out of the country. And while she is a piece controlled by Bernkastel it was established long before that a piece can only do what the real person would be able to do.
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Children Are a Waste / int_261c8d3f	type	Children Are a Waste
Children Are a Waste / int_261c8d3f	comment	On The Simpsons episode "Marge vs. Singles, Seniors, Childless Couples and Teens, and Gays", there is a group of single people who were tired of dealing with other people's children and led a campaign for more restrictions on kids ("The children are our future: today belongs to me!"). They succeeded, and Marge led a counter-campaign to get everything back to normal.
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Children Are a Waste / int_4617a9f2	type	Children Are a Waste
Children Are a Waste / int_4617a9f2	comment	Married... with Children is based entirely on this trope; as Al Bundy's motto says, "A man's home is his coffin." Al was a high-school football legend being recruited by colleges, until his loser girlfriend, Peg, got pregnant... and he had to take a job selling shoes. There's one episode where a high school football player is smitten with Kelly. Al tries to warn him that Kelly has been ruining men's lives for years... she started nine months before she was born.
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Children Are a Waste / int_585e8e37	type	Children Are a Waste
Children Are a Waste / int_585e8e37	comment	The 1972 sci-fi movie Z.P.G. (Zero Population Growth) has the human population striving to reach zero population growth. So, having a baby causes the parents and child to be put to death. Many people still want children, so vaguely lifelike dolls are sold to fill this need (they don't). Naturally, the protagonist does have a baby and must run from the authorities. Usually, it's mandatory for them to abort if they get pregnant (oddly, birth control was not mentioned). The state recognizes the psychological need most people have though and provides them with life-like dolls instead. As you'd expect, this really doesn't cut it for everyone.
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Children Are a Waste / int_5b408b1f	type	Children Are a Waste
Children Are a Waste / int_5b408b1f	comment	Episode 4 of The Walking Dead brings a very dark example. The community of Crawford in Savannah, Georgia is a group of Social Darwinists who feel anyone within the community must be able to "earn their keep." This means that no children are allowed as they waste resources, and a pregnant woman is seen given the ultimatum of abortion or exile.
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Children Are a Waste / int_5ce2f08b	type	Children Are a Waste
Children Are a Waste / int_5ce2f08b	comment	Black Butler has a prostitute going to a doctor to get an abortion with this as her excuse. That doctor had lost her ability to have children thanks to an accident that killed her husband and nearly her as well. This was the last straw before she snapped and became Jack the Ripper.
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Children Are a Waste / int_696b75c2	type	Children Are a Waste
Children Are a Waste / int_696b75c2	comment	In A Brother's Price, one male baby is born for every nine girls; they tend to spontaneously miscarry, abort, or die as small children. Boys, therefore, are economically valuable. A family — several sisters married to one man — usually tries to have one male child to swap for a boy who will marry their daughters, and others to sell for "brother's price". With those ratios, it's rare for a family to have multiple sons, but some keep trying, often becoming rather careless with their newborn daughters. Society views this as tremendously indulgent, and a family constantly producing children is seen as wasting its time and energy.
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Children Are a Waste / int_6ab1b49f	comment	Council Wars mentions this as a reason for the human population dwindling; with god-like technology available to everyone, most people have better things to do than look after kids. Note, this is not the only reason mentioned; that Society is still not over the overpopulation of the planet that occurred sometime in the past is also mentioned, thus making large families frowned upon.
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Children Are a Waste / int_6c1234ed	type	Children Are a Waste
Children Are a Waste / int_6c1234ed	comment	Meta example: much of the Dwarf Fortress fandom absolutely detests dwarf children for this. And while it's easy to modify the settings to prevent a baby boom, most of them prefer other treatments. Zig-Zagged In-Universe: since Dwarves will go to battle armed with the first thing they lay hands on, the Dwarven Baby Flail is a common fate of battle-born Dwarf children, but there are stories of the mothers who do this starving to death trying to find them back. The Steam release corrected this somewhat by letting do menial labors like hauling and constructing buildings, which really frees up the adults, though there are perils related to this as dedicated haulers get both very strong (moving boulders and logs around) and very irritable (moving mutilated corpses to the refuse stockpiles).
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Children Are a Waste / int_791fca44	type	Children Are a Waste
Children Are a Waste / int_791fca44	comment	In one of BioShock's loading screens, a scientist, Dr. Suchong, is quoted saying that children are a waste because they mature slowly and consume resources while contributing nothing. He then remarks that "There must be something to be done to speed the process." Ultimately, he succeeded in discovering a way to rapidly mature a child to adulthood. His success? You.
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Children Are a Waste / int_7c038c18	type	Children Are a Waste
Children Are a Waste / int_7c038c18	comment	In one episode of Phineas and Ferb we see a Bad Future where Doofenshmirtz is in charge. It turns out to be the Moral Guardians who really pushed the world into dystopia, though; they decided that all imagination was dangerous and irresponsible, and since children naturally were imaginative, so were they. For everyone's protection, they locked them away in cryogenic sleep until they grew up. The real implication is that it was entirely Linda's doing since it was a reaction to one of the boys' projects and we've seen that she's pretty much the only adult in town that doesn't know about them. In contrast, the alternate-dimension Doof from the movie just instituted a curfew.
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Children Are a Waste / int_8e1fe76d	comment	Jiz is a supporter of abortion.
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Children Are a Waste / int_93a07966	type	Children Are a Waste
Children Are a Waste / int_93a07966	comment	In Fate/Apocrypha, this is the origin story of Assassin of Black, Jack the Ripper. They represent the spirits and grudges of 80,000 abandoned, unwanted, and aborted children left by their mothers to die in Victorian-era England. This is why Jack is so obsessed with finding and eviscerating her mother, so she could return to the warmth of the womb one more time.
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Children Are a Waste / int_9440423a	comment	In the Popeye movie, Popeye and Poopdeck Pappy's bickering eventually leads to Pappy ranting on kids' brattiness, fickleness, and the general ingratitude of human nature;
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Children Are a Waste / int_9d7264f	type	Children Are a Waste
Children Are a Waste / int_9d7264f	comment	CSI: Miami had a guy who, while not opposed to monogamy, really disliked sharing his wife with another creature to the point of hiring three people to give his wife a Convenient Miscarriage via carjacking (one for surveillance, one to hit her rigged car and one to steal it); unfortunately he didn't count on one of them to beat her half to death and the baby survived anyway. This makes his apparently stable relationship with his son all the more perplexing until you realize that the boy might have set him up for the assault since he hated his stepmother and worked at a chop shop.
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Children Are a Waste / int_9e2f90f4	comment	Baby 5 from One Piece came from a poor family who openly bemoaned her birth as an unneeded strain on their resources. Her own mother abandoned her in the mountains when she was a small child, cruelly calling her useless as she did. This left Baby 5 with a traumatized need to prove her worth by acting incredibly servile and obedient to anyone she meets.
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Children Are a Waste / int_a5549ed0	comment	The Bible: In the gospel of Luke, as Jesus is going to the cross and He meets a group of women weeping for Him, He tells them, "Do not weep for Me, but rather weep for yourselves, for a time will come when they will say, 'Blessed are the barren, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed,'" implying that there will come a time when the people of Jerusalem will meet such death that bringing a child into the world during that time would only imperil them to the same suffering as everybody else.
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Children Are a Waste / int_ac4b6a62	type	Children Are a Waste
Children Are a Waste / int_ac4b6a62	comment	This is what many characters in Questionable Content seem to agree on implicitly. In several cases justified since they came from families where something went wrong, and most of them are in their 20s and nowhere near ready to consider having families. But apparently not even Marten Reed seems to think that the world needs another Marten Reed. The author has expressed the same opinion in the footnotes that accompanied one comic where this was expressed, so it's apparently an opinion he shares. Subverted with Faye, who later says she might consider having kids later in her life, indicating her views on the subject may have evolved.
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Children Are a Waste / int_ba3d2748	type	Children Are a Waste
Children Are a Waste / int_ba3d2748	comment	In a deleted scene of The Incredibles, Helen/Elastigirl has to deal with a condescending woman at a neighborhood barbecue. Helen then lays down a verbal smackdown, prompting the other woman to gape in amazement and ask what Helen did before she had her child.
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Children Are a Waste / int_babfc48	comment	In Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, the Countess of Groan side-steps the whole business neatly. Being formally presented with her infant heir (when they first met she would not have been in a position to fully appreciate him), she waves the proud nurse away with the imperious command
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Children Are a Waste / int_de6659ec	comment	Once Upon a Time has Peter Pan, who absolutely refuses to be a parent because that would mean sacrificing his carefree life as an immortal child. He was allowed to stay in Neverland in the first place because he abandoned his son, Rumpelstiltskin.
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Children Are a Waste / int_ed4a44cf	comment	Something like this seems to be the prevailing mindset in the movie version of Logan's Run. Most people live carefree lives and don't bother with child-rearing. Their "Utopia" has no family units, children are put in state homes by their "seed mother" and raised en masse. Francis notes that most men don't bother to hang out at the nursery to meet their children, and Logan (who is doing just that) declares that he's not so deviant that he's interested in meeting the mother. Is it any wonder a bunch of wild children went all Mad Max and took over an apartment tower? People recognize that kids are important to society as a whole, they just don't see any need to be personally involved in rearing them. In the book the movie was based on, people are killed upon reaching the age of 21, so the kid was going to be orphaned young anyway; the factory method makes a lot of sense. The movie raised it to 30, probably to avoid Dawson Casting or having wild orgies filled with kids 13 or younger.
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Children Are a Waste / int_f0a86c12	comment	Robin from How I Met Your Mother is deeply opposed to getting married and having children. This eventually causes her and Ted, who wants to settle down and start a family, to break up — they realize they can't ever sustain a long-term relationship if they want such different things in life. When Robin finds out she's infertile, she's still devastated because she now has to live with the knowledge that even if she decided she did want to be a mother, she no longer has any choice and the door she never wanted to open is now closed forever. To cope, she tries to convince herself that her infertility is a good thing, but when she gets home that night, she finds out that Ted has made a Christmas light show to make her feel better, and she finally breaks down.
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Children Are a Waste / int_ffc9bcc1	type	Children Are a Waste
Children Are a Waste / int_ffc9bcc1	comment	The movie Soylent Green plays with this trope, as the human population is very high and, in a classic plot twist, uses surplus people as Human Resources to make their newest food product.
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

Children Are a Waste	processingCategory2	Characters as Device
Children Are a Waste	processingCategory2	Cynicism Tropes
Never Had A Friend Like Me / Fan Fic / int_6627e429	type	Children Are a Waste
The Walking Dead: Real Monsters (Fanfic) / int_6627e429	type	Children Are a Waste
Gates of Heaven / int_6627e429	type	Children Are a Waste
Logan's Run / int_6627e429	type	Children Are a Waste
Popeye / int_6627e429	type	Children Are a Waste
Z.P.G. / int_6627e429	type	Children Are a Waste
A Brother's Price / int_6627e429	type	Children Are a Waste
Blackwater / int_6627e429	type	Children Are a Waste
Diary of a Wimpy Kid / int_6627e429	type	Children Are a Waste
Logan's Run / int_6627e429	type	Children Are a Waste
The Four Gospels / int_6627e429	type	Children Are a Waste
The Secret History / int_6627e429	type	Children Are a Waste
CSI: Miami / int_6627e429	type	Children Are a Waste
Married... with Children / int_6627e429	type	Children Are a Waste
Sunset Beach / int_6627e429	type	Children Are a Waste
Taxi / int_6627e429	type	Children Are a Waste
Educating Rita (Theatre) / int_6627e429	type	Children Are a Waste
Dwarf Fortress (Video Game) / int_6627e429	type	Children Are a Waste
The Walking Dead: Season One (Video Game) / int_6627e429	type	Children Are a Waste
Jiz (Web Animation) / int_6627e429	type	Children Are a Waste
A Dose of Buckley (Web Video) / int_6627e429	type	Children Are a Waste
Deer Me (Webcomic) / int_6627e429	type	Children Are a Waste
Girls Next Door (Webcomic) / int_6627e429	type	Children Are a Waste
Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story / int_6627e429	type	Children Are a Waste

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